Lost Planet 01 - The Lost Planet (8 page)

Parker blinked a few times and reached for the controls. “I … I don't know where to go,” he murmured.

“Anywhere! Get us out of here!”

More vehicles rushed past them, all at safe distances, but thousands were following, like a giant moving wall. Trembling, Parker pulled up on the controls to steer away from the moon and out of the path of the oncoming traffic.

“Faster!” said Chase. More and more vehicles filled the space around them, and many of them appeared to be slowing down as they neared the moon's surface, adding to the congestion. The Starjumper surged desperately upward, but it was clear that they were not going to outrun the deluge of ships.

Suddenly they were surrounded by hundreds of vehicles, beside them, above them, oncoming, and none following a straight path. Parker swerved erratically to avoid them, but he had lost all confidence in his piloting and his reactions were slow. Chase clutched the arms of his seat, yelping at every near miss, bracing for impact.

Bursts of color flickered around them as more vehicles collided in the packed space. The cruiser darted through narrow openings between other ships, flipping and turning in a dizzying way. Parker was losing control. Chase squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of a crash, but they hit a clear patch and zoomed forward, veering in a sharp arc down toward the moon's surface.

“Get us out of here!” Chase yelled.

“I can't!” Parker's voice was hysterical. “We've gotta try the breakaway!”

“The what?”

His face frozen in a rictus of terror, Parker flipped open a clear cover on the console. Underneath was a round lever. “Hold on!”

Then he yanked the lever.

The last thing that Chase was aware of was being thrown violently backward out of his seat and, briefly, the feeling of his head crashing into the cabin ceiling.

*   *   *

When Chase opened his eyes, he saw Parker's body lying crumpled beside him. “You okay?” His voice sounded brittle in the silent cabin.

Parker grunted and rolled over onto his back. “I feel like I got hit by a planet.”

A glance out the front window told Chase that they were no longer part of the flood of traffic from Trucon. “What just happened?” he asked, pushing his palms to his temples.

“Breakaway.”

“What?”

“I pulled the breakaway. The emergency escape. It hypercalculates and folds us over to a random coordinate.”

“What?”

“Good lords, dummy. It moves the cruiser without us having to calculate where it's going. You pull it as a last resort.” Parker climbed gingerly to his feet and returned to the piloting console. “We could be anywhere within a fifty-parsec range of Trucon. We're lucky it didn't put us in the middle of a star.”

Chase crawled to Mina, who lay in a jumbled heap in the corner, and rolled her over. Her eyes remained closed. He leaned in toward her ear and murmured her name.

Parker glanced over his shoulder. “She's not going to wake up without some serious technical intervention. Why don't you check on the guy we picked up, make sure he's still alive?”

“Probably not after this,” said Chase. He left Mina in the corner and went back down to the cargo hold, where the man in the space suit still lay flat on his back. He was breathing, but his skin was deathly pale and he didn't stir when Chase prodded his neck. Looking at his face, Chase realized that the man was much younger than he'd first thought—underneath a layer of scruffy facial hair, he looked about nineteen years old, maybe twenty at most.

Chase returned to the piloting cabin. “He's not waking up. What should we do with him?”

“I don't know,” said Parker. “Let's worry about ourselves first.”

Chase sat quietly beside him. The scene above Trucon replayed in his mind—the frantic flood of spaceships, the doomed planet in flames. “What happened back there?”

“I told you, the breakaway. How hard did you hit your head?”

“No, before that.”

Parker was quiet for a minute. “Something pretty awful.”

“Do you think it was an attack?”

Parker shrugged and shook his head.

“What about your home? What about Dr. Silvestri?”

“Stop.” Parker's face was pale and glazed with sweat. “I don't want to talk about it. We need to focus on the immediate problem.”

Looking at the complex piloting console, Chase knew he wouldn't be able to help Parker with the cruiser. Piloting was definitely not in his semantic memory. “So how do we do this?”

“I've just got to find our coordinates, and map a route to, uh…” Parker trailed off, and the cabin fell silent.

There was nothing to see out the front window except never-ending, star-speckled space. Chase closed his eyes and tried to absorb everything that had happened in the course of only a few hours. He'd just been getting used to the idea of being on Trucon, and now the entire planet was gone, along with Parker's home, and probably Dr. Silvestri as well. Mina was basically useless, and Chase was pretty sure she wouldn't have had time to contact Asa before everything happened. Not that Asa could find them now anyway.

Panic rose up in his throat. If they couldn't reach Asa, he wouldn't be able to ask questions about his microchip. He'd never be able to find his identity. Feeling his panic edge toward hysteria, he stopped himself.
First things first
. Before they could do anything, they had to find their way to another planet. Then get Mina fixed. And then he could get back to work figuring out his identity.

“Are you sleeping?” Chase's eyes snapped open to see Parker glaring at him. “So you're not going to help? I have to figure out how to get us out of this mess by myself, is that right?”

“What am I supposed to do?” said Chase. “Can't you just punch in the CFC destination or whatever?”

Parker hunched over the screens and shook his head. “Out here in deep space everything works differently. Different communication system, different piloting system. And I can't figure out these stupid mapping programs—do I calculate in the rate that the universe is moving when I plot a route, or is that already figured into the equation?” He banged his fist against the console in frustration.

Chase didn't have the slightest clue how to answer these questions, but he racked his brain for an idea. “Um … maybe if we wait for the guy down there to wake up? He must be able to pilot.”

“And what if he's in a coma and isn't going to wake up?” countered Parker. “He might have suffered too much exposure by the time we found him. And even if he's fine, we can't trust him. He's not a Fleet soldier. I bet he stole that Khatra.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I was telling you before, he's a Lyolian. A Khatra's a Fleet vehicle. He can't be from the Fleet, because even though they call it the
Federal
Fleet, it's pretty much run by Earth and only Earthans are allowed to be soldiers. He's probably a smuggler.”

So not only were they stranded and homeless, but they were probably ferrying a criminal around in the cargo hold. Things just kept getting better. “How do you know he's Lyolian?” Chase asked.

“Because he looks like one!” Parker exploded. He began rapidly typing information onto one of the screens. “I'm just going to plot a small fold to test it out. I'll try to move us over to the next star system.” Parker's finger hovered over a button on the screen. “Better buckle in.”

“Don't, Parker.” Chase tried to move his finger away from the button. “Let's wait one more—”

“Don't tell me what to do,” Parker snapped, and pressed his finger against the screen.

Chase was slightly more prepared this time, and so he fully experienced the fold. There was a strong jolt, and he felt as if his head were being sucked backward and his body being compressed. A bright flash filled his vision. He blinked a few times, feeling almost like he had blacked out for a moment. Strange, dark shapes filled their front window, but before Chase could figure out what they were, their ship shook with a loud
bang!
Something had hit the side of their cruiser. It hit again.
Bang!

“It's some kind of debris field!” Parker grabbed the manual controls and spun the cruiser around.

“Oh, this is much better than where we were!” shouted Chase. “Look out!”

A massive rock appeared right in front of them, and Parker pulled up hard on the yoke. Something else struck the roof of the cruiser with a painfully loud crunch. He fought with the controls, wheeling the ship back in the other direction. A long metallic squeal rang out, echoing throughout the vehicle as their port side dragged along another giant cosmic boulder.

“Oh lords,” Parker choked out. “I think … did we puncture…?”

A zipping noise sounded behind them as the door to the bunkroom opened. Chase whirled around in his seat. The young man staggered through the doorway in his space suit, his sunken eyes roving wildly.

“Are you trying to kill us?” he shouted. “Move aside!”

“Hey! What are you doing?” yelled Parker as the man shoved him away from the controls and squeezed into the seat in his bulky suit. “This is my cruiser. You can't just take it over.”

Whoever the guy was, he proved that he knew his way around a piloting console by quickly slowing the cruiser to a stop. They hovered motionless among the particles while he slid his fingers across the screen and opened up a map on the console. On the screen, hundreds of white dots surrounded the pulsing beacon of their cruiser. The field of debris around them was thick, and so large that it went all the way to the edges of the map.

“We're in the middle of an accretion disk. How did we get here?” the man asked in a strange, lilting accent. He opened up another screen, full of numbers.

“I had to pull the breakaway to get us away from Trucon,” said Parker. “It put us here.”

The man opened up a few more screens and studied them for a minute, and then he sighed loudly. “You're lying. There've been two folds.”

“Oh, well, I think the ship took a double-jump, must've been—” Parker faltered.

“Don't lie to me. What happened?” The man glared at him, his dark eyes blazing feverishly against the unhealthy pallor of his skin.

Parker stared at him, lost for words. The man lurched to his feet and grabbed Parker by the collar. “Tell me the truth!”

“We tried to plot a route,” Chase blurted out.

The man turned his glare on Chase for a moment, his lip curling. “Idiots! Do you know how much energy a single fold uses up in a granny cruiser like this? We'll be lucky if we last another day!” Shaking his head and muttering in another language, he began to unfasten his space suit.

Chase looked back at the console, trying and failing to see how much energy the cruiser had left. “Do you know where we are?”

“Not yet.” As he undid the latches on his sleeves, the man glanced around the cabin. His eyes rested on Mina for a moment, but he didn't say anything.

“Who are you?” asked Parker, squaring his shoulders and brushing a few sweaty strands of hair out of his face. “Did you know we saved your life?”

The man pulled off the top half of his suit. “My name is Maurus.”

“And you're from Lyolia.”

“That's right.”

“We found you floating next to a wrecked Khatra over Mircona. What happened?” asked Parker.

Maurus stepped out of the bottom half of his suit and tossed it on the cabin floor beside Mina. Underneath he wore a trim black jumpsuit. “That's none of your business,” he said, and returned to the pilot's seat.

“You're not from the Fleet. Did you steal the Khatra?” Parker asked.

Maurus ignored him.

“Did you see what happened to Trucon?” asked Chase. “Do you know what caused it?”

“Will you both shut up?” Maurus ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “I can't do this if you're babbling in my ear the whole time.”

Parker scowled and watched over Maurus's shoulder with his lips pressed together. Chase tried to watch as well, but the blur of screens, numbers, and maps made no sense to him. He looked back at the vast field of rubble crowding around them, the massive, dark shapes outlined by the light from some distant star.

“Clear out,” said Parker, nudging Chase from his seat.

Chase hastily buckled himself into one of the seats on the back wall as Maurus announced the next fold. With the same brain-sucking feeling, they left the debris field and reappeared in an area of blank, empty space.

“Do you know where we are now?” Chase ventured.

Maurus didn't answer.

“Do you know—” Parker began to repeat.

“Still working on that,” snapped Maurus. They sat in tense silence as they waited for Maurus to complete his calculations. “We're within a five-parsec range of Senica.”

“Alright, let's go there,” said Parker.

Maurus pondered the screen for a few more moments. “No. There's an emergency signal being broadcast. They're telling all survivors from Trucon to go to Qesaris. The Federation is setting up refugee camps there in the capital.”

“Do we have enough power to make it that far?” Parker asked.

“I can squeeze it out of her.”

“No.” Parker stood up straighter and crossed his arms. “This is my cruiser, and that means you're under my command. Go to Senica first and replenish the core.”

Maurus made one last entry on the console and turned in his seat, regarding Parker with a cool stare. “Your command, is that right?” Behind him, all the screens went black. “I'm not flying into any planetary zone until I know how two Earthan boys ended up piloting a vehicle unattended, with a blitzed android in the cabin. Did you hijack it?”

“No. It's my cruiser,” began Parker.

Maurus arched his eyebrows. “I don't believe you. What are your names?” He turned around to face Chase.